4 out of 5

It’s a little misleading with its pitched intent, but a certain amount of wiggle room must be allowed for Chatman’s (Wonder Showzen, Xavier) style of humor, and certainly flipping to any given page causes chuckles, cringes, or laughs of disbelief – or all three – so the endeavor, overall, is a success.

The cleverly named Mindsploitation is, if we believe it, a series of commissions sent to “homework assist” companies – i.e. companies who will write your assignments for you for a fee – and the responses sent back.  Not too exciting, sure, unless you’re Vernon Chatman and you ask for incredibly racist things, or letters to prove to kids that God doesn’t exist, or assignments that are complete nonsense.  The shoved-in “point” to this is to throw a little shade at a scrupulous practice, but it’s moreso Vernon’s continued social experiments of seeing what happens when you pair absurdities and let them ride.  These experiments work for me because they’re not outright pranks – although they certainly toe the line, admittedly occasionally crossing over – so much as they are an insane person’s take on trying to live a Police Squad! existence in the real world; innocent ignorance, and treating the responses you get with the same.  When I described the concept of the book to someone else, it certainly sounded mean spirited (a la Showzen’s dressing up a kid as Hitler and asking people on the street “What’s wrong with today’s youth?”), or like Chatman is just trolling people, but it’s all in the execution.  That there’s such a willingness to come across as the bad guy or the idiot in the situation pushes it into the realm of absurdity, or, as we wankery people like to call it in terms of jokes: subversiveness.

Now, again, ‘Mindsploitation’ doesn’t always achieve that sense.  The majority of the responses are fairly clearly from non-Native English speakers, and though Chatman never goes after that specifically as a source of humor, there is a bit of an “Engrish” discrepancy in the responses that muddies up the judgements on the scruples of those responding.  And then there are the commissions that are just mash-ups of made up words and ideas, and that Chatman got any response to those at all in almost an accomplishment.  Those are funny, but feel disconnected from the more risque material that prompts the “I can’t believe someone agreed to this assignment” response.  The impact of those instances is interesting.  At first, it’s just humorous, in that way that offensive humor can be (…to those of us accepting of that type of humor, anyhow).  Chatman says something outlandish, and he gets back a straight-faced reply.  But as these examples stack up (there are 50 total in the book, a little shy of 200 pages), you move beyond the chuckle-shock value to the jaws agape, head-shaking disbelief of realizing what’s actually happening here: that company/ies exist that apparently can shrug off the potential impact of what they’re being asked to write (i.e. Chatman confesses to murder, then asks for a letter proclaiming his innocence).  It’s insane.  …And it does prompt of moment of reflection from the reader, as well, to ask if we’re seeing the whole picture.  Whether intended or not, I think this is a non-negative aspect of the book: making you question face value of something.  After all, while I believe the claim that the final response is real, there could very well have been other back and forths in which Chatman pushed things in a certain direction that were excised from the book to punch up the joke value.  Who knows?

What I do know is that I got a good mix of discomfort and yuks from the read.  There’s definitely some filler – some excessive nonsense, and I can’t say the illustrations (by David OReilly) did much for me – but that filler might be a good breather from the soul-sucking possible reality of the lacking moralities Chatman was toying with with his experiment, which, at this point, is definitely a one-of-a-kind read.